


How to Be a Superhero Love Interest

by enchantedsleeper



Series: The Dumbest Love Story Ever [1]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017)
Genre: F/M, Identity Reveal, MJ is genre-savvy, Michelle works it out, mentions of the avengers, teenage crushes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-02
Updated: 2017-08-06
Packaged: 2018-12-10 08:54:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 11,858
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11688270
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/enchantedsleeper/pseuds/enchantedsleeper
Summary: Twin confusing things are happening to MJ. One, she's getting an unusual amount of attention from their friendly neighbourhood superhero, Spider-Man. And two, she might be starting to develop a crush on her ridiculous dork friend and teammate Peter Parker. More to the point, she thinks he might actually... like her back?Being MJ, it isn't long before she manages to put two and two together. After that, it's just a matter of figuring out how to be a superhero love interest.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So... this happened! I totally never expected to write fic for _Spider-Man: Homecoming_ , but I saw it a few weeks ago, loved it, and made a page for it [on Fanlore](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Spider-Man:_Homecoming), before deciding to read some fic just to see what it was like... Next thing I know, I'm completely obsessed with Spideychelle, reading dozens of fics and planning my own. XD
> 
> This started out as a vague, sort of fourth-wall-breaking idea about MJ reading Spider-Man fanfic from the previous two movieverses and trying to avoid the same tropes happening to her, before I realised that made no sense whatsoever, and it evolved into this. 
> 
> Thank you to all the amazing Spideychelle writers whose fic has inspired me to write my own! You know who you are, I hope <3 Part 2 is almost written and should be up by the weekend.
> 
> (Unbetaed and un-Americanpicked, so please excuse any stray Briticisms)

Peter Parker is obviously hiding something.

Michelle prides herself on her sharp observation skills, but it doesn’t take a person with any observation skills whatsoever to know that Peter Parker has a secret. He is, in point of fact, one of the worst, most obvious secret-havers in the history of having a secret. And in that list, she includes Mr. Medley, the librarian, who is clearly and indiscreetly having an affair with Ms. Burns from the science department. (He’s forgiven her more than a few overdue fines for keeping that one quiet).

But even though Peter is obviously hiding something, with his disappearances and his inconsistent excuses and his sketchy and conveniently vague “Stark Industries internship” that goes far beyond anything that a normal internship would require, Michelle is not going to investigate further. Because in the course of being observant, she has discovered that people don’t like it when she confronts them with her observations.

“God, Michelle, you’re like a hound dog,” her older sister, Evelyn, had groaned the last time Michelle interrogated her about why she’d come home late, reeking of cigarette smoke. “No wonder you don’t have any friends.”

“I don’t want any friends,” Michelle retorted flatly. More to the point, she doesn’t need friends, because friends make you compromise your beliefs in order to fit in. Michelle is her own person. And without friends, she also has way more free time.

Sure, Michelle has people that she’s on friendly terms with, whom she refers to as ‘friends’ for the sake of seeming socially acceptable. She sits near Peter Parker and Ned Leeds at lunch because their weirdness means that everyone else keeps their distance, and she doesn’t mind being associated with them by proxy. They’re good guys.

But for most of the time, when she walks between classes and when she walks to and from school in the morning and the evening, Michelle is alone.

It’s during one of these times, as she’s walking home from school, that she looks up and sees Spider-Man. He’s swinging her way, an acrobatic red-and-blue figure getting larger as he swoops from building to building.

The sight of him triggers a kind of falling feeling in her gut, and the world spins briefly as she’s taken back to DC and the terror of staring up at a shaking, collapsing building with her friends inside, knowing there was nothing she could do to help them.

But she also remembers a lithe, costumed figure impossibly scaling the side of the building, defying helicopters and threats to get inside and save them.

As Spider-Man swings closer, Michelle raises one hand and waves at him. She’s just one person in the throngs of people crowding the sidewalk; she doesn’t expect him to notice her. But to her surprise, at the peak of one of his swings, Spider-Man waves back.

The action causes him to fire his next web just a fraction too late and he fumbles it, missing the overhang he was aiming for and attaching to a window ledge lower down. As a result, his next swing takes him too low, and with a comical yell of shock Spider-Man goes crashing into the side of a dumpster. Michelle hears a series of clatters and a muffled, “Shit!”

She can’t help it – she giggles.

As Michelle continues on her way, she doesn’t notice a red and blue figure crawling up the side of a nearby building and perching on the rooftop, watching her go.

 

* * *

 

Michelle has a strict policy of non-intervention.

She watches, she learns, but she does not interfere. Mostly because she doesn’t care, or claims not to care, about the petty disputes her fellow students get into over whose job it was supposed to be to take the chemistry equipment to Mr. Cobbwell after class (even though she knows it was Lucy’s job, not Betty’s like Lucy claims), or when Ms. Beckett blames Jayden for writing dick jokes on the chalkboard in their English classroom when the handwriting is clearly Trisha’s.

Even on those rare occasions when she does care, she keeps her mouth shut and saves her energy for the arguments that matter. As an activist, she’s learned to pick her battles; you have to, otherwise you wind up angry and burnt out, of no use to anyone. And she’s definitely not about to start fighting anyone else’s for them.

And yet in spite of all that, when she hears Flash call Peter “Penis Parker” for the fiftieth time, she snaps.

“You know what, Flash? If you took all the time that you spend coming up with supremely unoriginal nicknames to insult people whose intelligence makes you feel insecure and channelled it into actually studying, you might be worth more to the Decathlon team than just dead weight.”

A dead silence follows her words. They’re in homeroom, five minutes before the first bell, and Flash is half-turned in his seat with one arm resting on the back of his chair, the cocky smirk sliding off his face and giving way to taut anger.

Peter, in the desk behind Flash, and Ned, next to him, are both staring at her gobsmacked, mouths hanging open.

Dimly, Michelle wonders if she just compromised her position as Declathon team captain by insulting a member of the team, but she doesn’t care. She flicks a curl of hair out of her face, plunging on before Flash can muster a response. 

“Oh but go on – insult me, too; I can take it. Because deep down I think you’re just scared of us. You see, Flash, unlike you, we aren’t afraid to be individuals. So we won’t go trailing around after you trying to kiss your ass. What a shame.” And she finishes by drawing an imaginary tear down one cheek.

There is muffled snickering from around the room. Flash’s face is slowly turning purple with indignant rage; he opens and closes his mouth, but before he can get any of the words out, the bell rings.

The tension in the room breaks, and the noise level immediately rises as people start to laugh and chatter more openly. Michelle allows herself a small victory smirk. Flash is still staring at her, but she holds his gaze, unblinking, refusing to be the first to look away, until Ms. Gardner sweeps into the room and calls for quiet.

Two seats away, Ned is grinning at her like she’s Christmas, his birthday and the Fourth of July come all at once. And Peter—

She glances over at Peter and immediately looks away, her cheeks flushing, because he’s giving her this _look_ that she’s never seen before on another person.

It’s respect, fondness, amusement, and admiration all rolled into one. Even when Michelle’s not looking at Peter, she can still feel his gaze on her.

She stares down at the table top, aimlessly twiddling a pen and wondering why her stomach suddenly feels so weird. This is Peter _Parker_. Peter Parker, of the infamous puppy-dog crush on Liz Allan, which he’s definitely not over even though she moved out of state a month ago.

Peter Parker, whose brain-to-mouth filter is non-existent, whose love for science is matched only by his love for Lego and Star Wars, and who spends all his time when he’s not at school sticking together said Legos in his bedroom with his equally dorky friend, Ned Leeds, and coming up with weird new elements for the periodic table.

Ms. Gardner begins taking attendance, and Michelle answers automatically to her name. Peter eventually looks away from her, which is a relief, but her heart is still going at twice its usual rate.

It could be leftover adrenaline from the confrontation with Flash, but Michelle knows better. Flash doesn’t scare her. It has nothing to do with him, and everything to do with the boy sitting in the desk behind him.

 

* * *

 

“You should’ve seen the look on Flash’s _face!_ I thought he was going to bust a kidney!” Ned crows at lunch.

“Why a kidney?” Peter asks him.

“I dunno, but he nearly did.”

Michelle rolls her eyes and wishes she’d gone to the library like she originally planned. She’d thought that scooting her chair even further than usual away from Peter and Ned would have given them the hint that she doesn’t want to talk, but Ned had simply sat right down next to her with his lunch tray. Peter had hovered awkwardly, like he was torn between respecting her wish for space and sitting next to his best friend, and eventually followed suit.

“It was _awesome,_ ” Ned repeats reverently. “And Flash couldn’t even say a thing! I think he’s scared of you.”

Michelle snorts, though he’s right; Flash hasn’t said a word to her since homeroom, hasn’t even glanced in her direction. She isn’t going to kid herself that she’s safe, though; they have Decathlon practice right after school.

She glances over at Peter, and finds him giving her that _look_ again. He’s also not saying anything, which from a normal person, would be weird. From Peter “motor-mouth” Parker, it might just be a sign that the world is ending.

She feels like she might claw out of her skin if she doesn’t _do_ something, so finally she demands, “ _What_ , Peter?”

“Thanks, MJ,” he replies, with warm sincerity in every syllable.

The feeling in her stomach multiplies by about a hundred. Goddamn it.

 

* * *

 

Michelle enters the hall for Decathlon practice that afternoon with a poised calm that masks the apprehension she feels underneath. She’s not afraid of Flash, but if he tells Mr. Harrington what she said about him earlier, she could lose the team captaincy.

She’s not sure exactly why he got under her skin _so_ badly earlier. She doesn’t like bullies, true, and she’s long thought that Flash needed to be taken down a peg. She’s sure that most of homeroom, for all that they pretend to like Flash, were secretly rooting for him to go down. But even so, the intensity of the anger that she’d felt in that moment surprised her.

Ned waves at her cheerily from the edge of the hall, which she ignores. She glances over and sees someone talking to Mr. Harrington, and her stomach lurches – but it’s not Flash, it’s Peter. He’s saying something earnestly (which is pretty much his default setting), gesturing widely with his hands while Mr. Harrington nods.

Michelle walks past them and goes up to the stage, where Abe and Cindy are mucking around. Flash is sitting off to the side, but he’s completely silent, and doesn’t look at her.

“All right, guys,” she says, and even without raising her voice, the group instantly quiets down. “Let’s run some drills.”

She tries not to pay attention to whatever Peter is still discussing with Mr. Harrington as she drills the team on general knowledge questions, but she can’t help but hear when Mr. Harrington calls Flash over to them. He looks sulky as he walks over, and only looks more so at whatever Mr. Harrington is telling him.

Peter, meanwhile, has wandered over to join the group running drills. Ned gets up to let Peter take his seat and his buzzer.

“Nice of you to finally join us, Peter,” says Michelle sarcastically. It’s no big deal really, but she wants to try and make him squirm a little bit.

“Sorry, MJ,” says Peter with a contrition that only makes her narrow her eyes more. With Liz as captain, he bailed on nationals with less remorse than he’s showing her right now. “I just had to clear something up with Mr. Harrington.”

Michelle lets it go, but after practice she corners him before he can disappear out the door in point five seconds like he usually does.

“So, what were you talking about with Mr. Harrington that was so important? And what did it have to do with Flash?”

Flash had also rejoined the group about two minutes after Peter, looking mutinous. She hadn’t said anything, and neither had he, even to make his customary snide remarks about Peter’s ‘Stark internship’. However, he’d answered several questions in the quick-fire round, and even got most of them right.

Peter grins at her sheepishly. “Well, y’know, I just wanted to clear up a couple things with him, about earlier.”

“Earlier,” Michelle repeats.

“Yeah. I figured Flash might try and get you in trouble with Mr. Harrington over what you said, ‘cause it was about the Decathlon team, so I wanted to try and make sure you didn’t. Get in trouble, I mean. So I just told him that there was an argument, you stood up for me and might’ve said some kinda harsh stuff, but you were defending me. And he said it was okay.”

“Just ‘okay’?” says Michelle.

“Well, he said it was between you guys and that you and Flash could sort it out between yourselves, without involving the Decathlon team,” Peter says with a diffident shrug. “So, y’know. No worries!”

Michelle treats Peter to a long, hard look before punching him lightly in the arm. “I don’t need you to play the hero for me,” she tells him.

“You’re welcome, MJ,” he replies with a brilliant grin.

 

* * *

 

The problem with breaking her policy of non-intervention is that when she does, Michelle always winds up getting _involved_. With _people_.

To be more specific, she thinks that she might actually be becoming friends with Peter and Ned. Not ‘on friendly terms’ friends, but _actual_ friends.

After that day, she somehow never goes back to sitting two or three seats away from them at lunch. At first, she still keeps her distance conversationally, silently reading her book and ignoring Peter and Ned’s chatter, but then she finds herself somehow getting drawn into one of their dumb debates about which _Star Wars_ movie is the best ( _Rogue One_ , obviously).

After that they somehow get on to debating the _Lord of the Rings_ and Eowyn’s characterisation in the books versus the movies (Michelle has very strong opinions; Tolkien is great, but he sucked at writing women) and whether or not another set of _Harry Potter_ movies was a good idea. Michelle is slightly unnerved to find that she has a lot in common with these dorks.

Peter and Michelle keep a whispered debate going all the way through History and up to the final bell, with Peter contending that creators should have the right to keep making new works in their franchise, and Michelle arguing that they should release the IP into the public domain so that fans can have a go at making their own versions. (“But then we wouldn’t have _Rogue One_ , and you said it was your favourite!” Peter needles her. “We also probably would’ve got a diverse _Star Wars_ a lot sooner,” Michelle retorts, and grins when his face falls.) She’s smiling as she says goodbye to them, and she carries on smiling all the way home.

Maybe having actual-friends isn’t so bad after all.

She’s wrong-footed, though, when Peter invites her over to watch _Firefly_ with him and Ned at his house two days later. Ned stayed back after Geography class to talk to the teacher, so it’s just her and Peter at their usual lunch table. Peter has set his tray down next to hers but isn’t sitting down yet, nervously shifting on the spot as he looks down at her.

“…And so I thought it might be cool if maybe, you know, you came over and watched it with us? My aunt’s cool, she won’t mind. You could stay for dinner,” Peter rambles.

Michelle opens her mouth, unsure what to say. Sitting together at lunch and arguing about geek culture is one thing, but going over to someone’s house, meeting their mom (well, aunt) and staying for dinner is something else entirely. She’s a solitary person by nature, and she needs her time alone after spending the whole day around people.

Plus, she can’t help thinking it would be awkward with just the three of them – she doesn’t _know_ them that well, not really – and it would make this whole “situation” with Peter, the one where they keep accidentally catching each other’s eyes for too long and then blushing and awkwardly looking away, so much worse. It’s bad enough at school, but in close quarters with no good escape route? Ugh. Recipe for disaster.

“I actually have this book that I really need to finish for English-” Michelle starts.

“Oh, yeah, no, of course, I get it – though I mean, you could bring it with you?” Peter offers.

“-and I have to be home by 8 o’clock anyway on a school night, my older sister is kind of strict,” she finishes over him.

It’s not a lie, but it’s a half-truth; Evelyn never holds her to the 8 o’clock curfew that their parents set, and she wouldn’t care if Michelle went out for the evening or stayed over a friend’s house. Michelle just hasn’t ever wanted to before.

“Sure, yeah, right…” Peter says, looking for all the world like a puppy whose tail she just trod on. “Maybe some other time.”

He sits down, and Michelle returns awkwardly to her lunch. Fortunately, Ned arrives before the tense silence can drag out much longer.

“Hey, guys! Sorry that took so long. So, did you ask her yet?” he says to Peter. Michelle’s face grows warm.

“Yeah, uh, I did,” says Peter in a despondent voice, not looking at her. Ned somehow fails to pick up on his tone.

“Great! So, we’ll see you later?”

“Actually, I have a- uh-” Michelle begins.

“She has stuff to do, and, um, her mom-”

“Sister-”

“Sister, yeah, sorry, is kinda strict.”

“Oh.” Ned looks between the two of them, then shrugs. “That sucks.”

Michelle leaves five minutes later, mumbling something about having to go to the library.

She doesn’t know where all this guilt has suddenly come from, but it sits in her stomach all day. The thought of another evening spent by herself in her room, reading, suddenly seems cold and empty rather than appealing.

She fidgets distractedly all through Spanish, and eventually pulls out her copy of _Brave New World_ and skimreads the last few pages under her desk. Then as the bell rings, she pushes her way through the crowd of students in the hallway and hurries to catch up with Peter and Ned.

“-sure she didn’t mean it like that, dude, she just-” Ned cuts off mid-sentence when he sees her. “Oh, Michelle. Hey.”

“Hey,” Michelle says awkwardly.

There’s a pause, during which she resolutely forces herself to swallow her pride, then goes on,

“So I managed to finish my book during Spanish, and I was wondering if the offer to watch _Firefly_ with you guys is…”

“Yeah!” Peter interrupts her eagerly. “Yeah, if you’re sure your sister won’t-”

“I already texted her, so it probably won’t be a big deal,” says Michelle. In fact, Evelyn’s reply to her off-handed text about spending the evening at a friend’s house had been,

**_what???? you????_ _who died and gave you a social life???_**

She’d decided to interpret that as an okay.

They go to Peter’s house, and she manages not to embarrass herself in front of his aunt (who is surprisingly young, and also endearingly pleased to meet another friend of her nephew’s).

Up in his room, which is just as nerdy as she had predicted, they sit shoulder to shoulder and watch _Firefly_ on Ned’s laptop. Michelle has seen the show half a dozen times before, and she keeps up a running commentary of random trivia and dry remarks about the actors’ terrible Mandarin, which entertains the two boys to no end.

All in all, it’s not a terrible evening at all, and when Peter suggests that they hang out again on Friday night to finish the second half of the series, she doesn’t think twice before agreeing.

 

* * *

 

One problem with being friends with Peter and Ned is that it becomes a lot harder for Michelle to ignore the fact that Peter is hiding something.

But she manages to forget about it for a little while, right up until she gets to Peter’s house for the second half of the _Firefly_ marathon and Ned answers the door.

“Oh, uh, Peter had to cancel on tonight. Something came up.”

Michelle frowns. “He didn’t say anything at school,” she points out. In fact, Peter had been looking forward to their evening, and had checked with her at least three times to make sure she was still coming over. What was so important that he had to bail at 5pm on a Friday?

“Yeah, no, it was really last-minute,” Ned explains, although Michelle doesn’t really buy it.

“So… what are you doing here?” Michelle asks. The ‘this isn’t actually your house’ is implied, though to be fair, she doesn’t know anything about Ned’s home situation, so maybe half-living at Peter’s house is normal for him.

“Uh, May invited me to stay for dinner,” Ned says awkwardly.

“Oh.”

There’s a pause, during which Michelle tells herself not to be stupid; of course she’s not on the sort of terms yet that would see her invited to a guy’s house when he’s not even home. That’s lifelong-best-friend shit.

“Well, I’d better get going, then,” says Michelle, and turns to go.

“Hey, um-” Ned calls before she can get too far, and Michelle waits. “Do you… wanna stay for dinner, too? I’m sure May won’t mind, she always makes extra…”

Michelle half spins around. “I wouldn’t want to bother her, really, I’ll just head home and-”

“It’s fine, I swear – May? Can Michelle stay for dinner, too?”

So, reluctantly, Michelle steps inside just as Peter’s Aunt May comes into the front hall, drying her hands on a dishtowel. “Oh, Michelle! How good to see you again!”

She smiles, but Michelle thinks there’s something a little strained and brittle about it. “Of course you can stay for dinner.”

Michelle mentally instructs herself to stop being in observation mode; she’s been invited over as a guest, she needs to stop _analysing_ things. “Thanks so much for having me, May. I don’t want to intrude.”

“Really, I insist! Peter should be back later, anyway; he just had to, uh, run an errand.”

 _‘Run an errand’?_ Michelle thinks. Clearly being a terrible and unconvincing liar runs in the family. But she says nothing; it’s none of her business, and whatever this weird secret is that Peter has, at least his aunt is in the know.

Dinner is a strange experience. Ned and May both seem on edge, and Ned keeps checking his phone the whole time. Occasionally Michelle will have her head bent over her food and at the edge of her vision, catch him exchanging looks with May, silently communicating something.

She could try to fill the silence, but she’s never really seen the point of small talk. Occasionally May will seem to realise that they’re acting weird and brightly inject a question about school into the silence, which Michelle answers as normally as she can. All in all, it’s sort of a relief when dinner is over.

Michelle offers to help wash up, but May waves her off. “Don’t be silly, you’re the guest! I got this. You two go upstairs and watch a movie or something.”

Ned looks at her uncertainly. Michelle likes Ned well enough, but it’s not the same dynamic without Peter around, and she can already imagine how awkward it would be sitting down to watch a movie with just the two of them. “That’s okay; I should really be getting home. Thanks again for dinner.”

Ned, obviously relieved, offers to see her out.

“So, uh, see you at school tomorrow,” he says as she shoulders her bag.

“Monday,” Michelle corrects him dryly. “Tomorrow’s the weekend.”

“Oh yeah! Right.”

“Tell Peter I said hi, when he gets back from… Whatever it is he’s doing.”

Michelle and Ned look at each other for a moment. Michelle can see in his eyes that he’s waiting for her to ask the obvious question of just where the hell Peter is and what he’s doing. A big part of her wants to ask. But she doesn’t want to hear another flimsy lie, and besides, she promised herself that she wouldn’t try and figure this out.

Even though she _really_ wants to.

“Night, Ned.”


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Here we go with Chapter 2! I'm really pleased to have got this one out. I already had most of it written when I posted Chapter 1, but the end bit wound up surprisingly long, and I sort of hadn't figured out _exactly_ how it would end, so I'm happy to be done and posting it.
> 
> I had a lot of fun coming up with some of the details from the wider universe of superheroes that this story exists in. Also, one of the fun things about the way that MCU has decided to approach Spider-Man, going very light on his 'origin story', is that there's loads of room to make up our own headcanon, and as a fanfic author I especially appreciate that.
> 
> Thank you SO MUCH to everyone who left comments and kudos on Chapter 1 and was so lovely and encouraging! I hope that this chapter lives up to your expectations <3
> 
> Also, a note: the Decathlon questions were the result of some very quick Googling. They're correct to the best of my knowledge, but I'm no expert. As before, unbetaed and please excuse any stray Briticisms you find lying around. They're harmless, honestly.

Michelle hasn’t seen Spider-Man since that time he waved to her while he was swinging around the city, but she unexpectedly runs into him the next morning, while she’s out buying some stuff from the corner store.

For someone who can scale his way up the sheer side of a tower and swing with enough force to shatter reinforced glass, he sure spends a lot of his time doing things like helping old ladies with their groceries or rescuing cats from trees.

This particular time, he looks to be helping out with a stock delivery. Michelle comes out of the store just as Spider-Man is webbing the last of the boxes to the ground.

“I think that’s the last of them, Mr Michaels!” he says. Michelle hasn’t really had a chance to hear Spider-Man’s voice much – he spoke to her before going up the tower in DC, but she was too panicked to really take it in – and it’s a lot more high-pitched than she would have expected. Almost like Spider-Man is a kid.

“Please, call me Andy,” says the store owner in his thick Brooklyn accent. “I can’t thank you enough, Spidey; you’ve really saved my ass.”

“Any time,” says Spider-Man with a little finger salute. Then- “Oh hey, it’s you.”

Michelle looks around, and realises that Spider-Man is talking to her. At least, his face is turned towards her, though with those blank eyepieces it’s still hard to tell exactly where he’s looking. 

“Hey,” she says. 

“You waved at me the other day,” he says. “How’s it going?”

He remembers her from _that?_ Michelle is impressed. Spider-Man must swing his way past thousands of people every day, and tons of them probably wave at him. Maybe he remembers because she made him crash into a dumpster. Michelle smiles a bit at the memory.

“It’s good; I’m just buying some groceries.” Michelle hefts her bag as evidence.

“You, uh, you want a hand with those?”

Michelle looks down at the single plastic bag she’s carrying, and back up at Spider-Man with a withering glare. She thinks he cringes back slightly. 

“I think I can carry a few bags of Cheetos and some bread, thanks.”

“Right, uh-”

“You probably don’t remember,” Michelle cuts across him, because she never really thought she’d get the chance to talk to Spider-Man, but now she has, she wants to say this, “but you saved the lives of all of my friends about a month ago. In DC.”

There’s a pause, during which Spidey seems to be casting his mind back. “The Washington Monument?” he says. “Yeah, you were outside it, right?”

“Yeah. I didn’t really wanna go up.”

“Not a fan of heights?” he asks.

“I just didn’t really want to celebrate a monument that was built by slaves,” Michelle tells him, pushing a curl of hair out of her face. They’re still standing on the sidewalk outside Andy’s, but they’ve moved to one side so as not to block the people going in and out of the store. A few people are glancing at them, but no-one really seems surprised to see Spider-Man.

“Oh,” says Spidey after a while. “I hadn’t even thought of that.”

Now she’s wondering what race Spider-Man is underneath that mask. That is, she’s assuming he looks like a normal person and not a bug-thing. Discourses that Michelle has read theorise that Spider-Man is, or was, probably human originally and either has a mutant gene, or underwent some kind of transformation. The dumbest (and yet weirdly plausible) theory has him being bitten by a radioactive spider.

“What were you doing in DC, anyway?” asks Michelle, to distract herself from weird thoughts, and because she’s always wondered what a New York superhero was doing so far outside of New York.

“Oh, I, uh, I was on vacation,” Spidey says. 

Michelle digests this. She supposes he must have some sort of a life outside of superheroing, so it’s plausible that he travels around sometimes. 

 “That’s cool. Well, uh, thanks. Anyway. For the saving thing.”

“No problem. It’s what I do!” says Spider-Man, almost excessively chipper. She knows someone else a bit like that. “Anyway, I’d better get back to it, the, uh, the saving people thing-”

Thinking of Peter reminds Michelle of the fact that he, supposedly, knows Spider-Man personally. She remembers the gym class where he first came out with it, after a lot of egging on from Ned; she’d always thought the two of them were just showing off to try and impress Liz, but now the guy is here, she might as well ask him-

“Hey, do you know Peter Parker?”

Spider-Man freezes in the act of firing a web towards a nearby building and looks at her. “Peter… Parker?” he says slowly. “We might’ve met… uh, he’s one of Stark’s interns, right?”

“Yeah, and he was there in DC the day that… Oh, except I guess you wouldn’t have seen him, because he disappeared-”

Michelle stops short.

He disappeared. Peter Parker disappeared, the way he always does, without warning or explanation, in the middle of a Decathlon trip to DC.

And Spider-Man appeared, _in DC_ , where he’s never been before, on the exact day and time that her friends, the Decathlon team, needed saving.

Michelle can’t believe that she’s been so _stupid._

She barely hears Spider-Man’s hasty, “Well, gotta go, see ya!”, lost in a cascade of sudden realisation.

Spider-Man started showing up around New York about nine months ago. Around that time, Peter Parker developed a sudden aversion to gym class, crying off with a series of increasingly unlikely excuses or showing up dressed in a baggy tracksuit instead of the school regulation shorts and T-shirt. The coach had made him run laps around the track for it, but he (skinny, gangly, uncoordinated Peter Parker) managed it without even breaking a sweat.

Because he’s _Spider-Man_.

Eventually Peter had started wearing regular gym clothes again, revealing a surprisingly toned and muscular figure that she definitely didn’t remember him having before. (Not that she had noticed, or anything).

Peter awkwardly laughed off questions about how he got so “buff”, saying that he had started to work out in his spare time. A lot of the girls in their class (and a couple of the guys) started paying a lot more attention to Peter after that, at least until his extreme uncoolness (and his obvious, tunnel-vision crush on Liz Allan) eventually drove them away again.

Four months after that, Peter disappeared for three days on a ‘Stark internship retreat’, and at the same time, Spider-Man had been in Berlin, swinging to the aid of Iron Man and the pro-Accords Avengers in the clash against Captain America and the other ‘rebels’.

Peter Parker is Spider-Man.

Michelle gets home, and dumps her shopping bag on the kitchen table without even hearing what Evelyn is saying to her.

She goes into her room, which is lined from wall to wall with stacks of books. Evie often refers to it as her “library”, or her “book cave”. Some of them are supported by a rickety bookcase, but most are just piled up, making it kind of a mission sometimes trying to get to the book she wants.

Michelle goes to the superhero section of her book collection, where she’s got a couple of big, glossy, popular-literature volumes, several dry, academic textbooks, and a bunch of printed-out journal papers. From the midst of this, she extracts a slim, self-published book with a plain red cover.

The author of this book has only just published it, and she’d managed to get hold of an early copy because she’s friends with the author online. The title is, _Our Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man: Recollections of Encounters with New York’s Local Superhero._ The author had spoken to more than fifty people in the process of gathering their research.

Michelle sinks down onto her bed with the book on her hands, and finds the part she’s looking for in the introduction:

**_Who is Spider-Man?_ **

_When putting together this volume, I purposely made a decision to avoid speculating or opening a debate on who exactly is behind the mask of our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man._

_Some of the individuals interviewed mention wishing they knew who Spider-Man was, most of them just so they could thank him, but I deliberately didn’t take any of the interviews down that path. It is the opinion of this author that Spider-Man is owed his – or her, or their (see my note about pronouns, lower down) – privacy, and we should respect that privacy._

_Spider-Man is one of us, and that’s all that matters._

That afternoon, Michelle re-reads the entire book. It was always an interesting read, stitching together a timeline of Spider-Man’s activities since his first (known) appearance – intervening to save a kid from a gang of bullies – through the medium of recollections from people he’d helped, and witnesses to his exploits. With the knowledge that she has now, though, it’s nothing short of mind-blowing.

Peter Parker, her dorky, energetic, talkative friend from high school, did all this.

Michelle closes the book and thinks hard. Should she confront Peter about what she knows? She thinks he must have cottoned on to where her thoughts were leading as she spoke to him as Spider-Man earlier, and the realisation that stopped her in her tracks. But maybe he’s hoping that she won’t quite have managed to put the pieces together, or that she doesn’t have enough evidence to be sure.

She decides to play dumb for a little while longer, and wait for Peter to make the next move.

 

* * *

 

Even though Michelle resolved to act normally when she saw Peter at school, it’s still weird the first time that she catches sight of him in the hallway, chatting to Ned by his locker. She opens her locker, and studies him covertly out of the corner of her eye. She spent some of Sunday watching Spider-Man videos on YouTube, and now that she’s looking for it, their mannerisms are the exact same: the same quick, jaunty movements; the same restless energy; the same walk.

Peter looks over, and she accidentally catches his eye. Not wanting to seem like a creeper, Michelle heads over to join them both.

“Hey, MJ, how was your weekend? You get up to anything?” asks Peter, and grins at her. Michelle thinks he seems nervous, but it could just be her imagination.

She shrugs. “Not bad. I did some reading. Oh, you’ll never guess who I ran into outside of the corner store on Saturday, though.”

“Who?” asks Ned. “Ooh! Was it Summer Glau?”

“Summer Glau lives in Texas,” Michelle tells him. “No, it was Spider-Man.”

Both boys’ eyes widen. Michelle continues blithely, “Yeah, it was really cool, actually. We chatted for a while.”

“Really, about what?” asks Peter, sounding slightly breathless.

“Just, like, how he saved the lives of everyone in DC and stuff. I asked him what he was doing there, and he said he was on vacation. Pretty lucky if you think about it, that Spider-Man was on vacation in DC at the exact same time as Nationals, and knew to come to the rescue.”

“Yeah, I guess that is lucky,” says Peter. Ned nods vigorously.

“Must’ve been like, fate or something.”

“Must’ve been,” Michelle agrees. “Well, we’d better get to class.”

After school, they have Decathlon practice, and Peter is one of the first group to take the stage and answer questions. Michelle shuffles her cards and looks at him.

“Peter – first question,” she says. “What is the tensile strength of dragline spider silk?”

Peter gapes at her for a second. “Uh, 1.3 GPa.”

“Correct. What is the height of the Washington Monument?”

“169 metres.”

“Correct. What is the word used to describe a happy coincidence, or fortunate and chance turn of events?”

“Seren…dipity?”

“Just about. What are the-”

Flash ‘ding’s his bell, interrupting her. “I have a question. Can the two of you quit flirting and get a room already?”

Peter blushes, and Michelle narrows her eyes. “All right, Flash, if you’re feeling neglected: What is the 81st element in the periodic table?”

“Lead,” Flash answers confidently. Michelle makes an error noise.

“Uh-uuuh. Lead is the 82nd element. Anyone else?”

Peter hits his bell. “Thallium.”

“Good.”

The rest of practice goes as normal, though Michelle makes sure to throw several other tricky questions at Flash just to make him sweat. He’s gone back to acting like his usual self, that is to say an annoying douche, in Decathlon practices, but Michelle is more than equal to it.

He glares at her as practice finishes and they gather up their books and bags. Michelle stares back, hard, until Flash looks away.

“Hey, uh, MJ, can I… talk to you for a sec?” Peter appears next to her and asks, quietly. Ned is hovering behind him, but Peter turns and makes a discreet ‘go away’ motion, and he leaves, waving goodbye to them both.

Michelle should have expected this. She’d showed her hand too much with those questions; if Peter had had cause to suspect before that she knew his superhero identity, he’ll be sure of it now.

Michelle suddenly wonders if she’s fucked everything up. She was only trying to mess with him a bit, but what if he’s angry with her? It surprises her just how much she doesn’t want to lose Peter’s friendship.

Michelle never, ever second-guesses her own actions, but Peter Parker seems to have a special ability to make her feel off-kilter.

“Like, right now?” she asks him, trying to seem coolly disinterested. Normally, she wouldn’t even have to work at it.

“Yeah… Can we go outside?”

They walk out of the front double doors and take a right towards the sports field. Michelle waits for Peter to break the silence. She sees him as having the advantage here, but he seems to be more nervous than she is.

A couple of times, he opens his mouth only to close it again, as if – for once – he’s not sure how to begin talking. Eventually he clears his throat.

“So, I uh, I wanted to ask you something…”

“Ask away,” says Michelle, shading her eyes and gazing over at the bleachers.

“Do you want to go see a movie together on Friday night?”

Michelle stares at him in shock. Peter is blushing bright red, but manages to meet her eyes and give her a small smile.

That wasn’t what she was expecting him to ask at _all_. This whole time she was gearing herself up for him to confront her about knowing his identity, and he was trying to work up the courage to ask her out.

Michelle has no idea how to reply. If she’d managed to figure out that this was coming, she could have prepared herself, tried to work through her feelings beforehand and know what she wanted to say. But once again, her famous skills of observation have completely deserted her – especially given that she still thought he was gone on Liz. When did Peter Parker start to make her completely lose her head?

“I, uh…”

What can she say? Does she _want_ to go on a date with him? (There is a mushy, gooey sensation in the pit of her stomach that says she wants to very much, but she tries to ignore that and force herself to be objective).

More to the point, he hasn’t confronted her about the Spider-Man thing, so does he still not know that she knows? Can she agree to a date with him and pretend not to know about his identity?  Should she tell him what she knows first?

Peter’s face starts to fall, as he takes her silence for rejection. “Or- or not! If you’re not interested, that’s cool! I know we haven’t been friends, like, proper friends for that long, and maybe I’m getting kinda ahead of myself. I just- I really like you, and there’s this arts film playing at the theatre on Friday which I thought you might wanna go see…”

“Arts film?” asks Michelle, latching onto the one piece of information in Peter’s nervous babbling that she knows how to deal with.

“Right, yeah, I totally forgot to even mention that part! It’s this independent movie made by an all-female production group, they’re, uh, kinda cool. I’ve been following their work a bit. And this latest one has a lot of literary references, so, it seemed like it might be your thing…”

Michelle is touched that he’d thought of her. Normally she’s more into books than movies, but she appreciates good cinema, and it does sound like an interesting work. Also, who knew that Peter Parker was an indie film buff?

“That sounds pretty good,” she says out loud. Trying to steer the conversation onto slightly safer ground, she jokes, “Congrats, Parker; you may just have halfway decent taste in movies.”

Peter’s grin looks like it’s going to split his face in two. “So… you’ll go?” he checks, as if she might decide to suddenly take back her acceptance.

“Yeah, sure. Should be fun,” she says lightly.

“Okay! Cool. So, I’ll see you on Friday?” Peter asks, and then seems to realise that it is, in fact, only Monday. “And, uh, tomorrow. And at Decathlon on Wednesday.”

“ _Especially_ Decathlon,” says Michelle, making the most of the jokey, safe ground they’ve arrived back on. She leads the way back towards the school, because she has a feeling that if she didn’t, Peter would keep them standing out in the middle of the school grounds until nightfall. “You miss Decathlon over my dead body.”

“Cross my heart and hope to die,” says Peter as they reach the gate, and he actually crosses his heart like a first-grader. He’s almost radiating happiness, and Michelle wants to roll her eyes about as much as she wants to be endeared by it. “Okay, bye, MJ!”

“See ya,” says Michelle, almost to herself. It’s only after he turns the corner that the full impact of what just happened really hits her.

She just agreed to go on a date with a superhero.

 

* * *

 

Because she’s Michelle, the first thing that she does when she gets home is to do research.

Almost all of the media attention around superheroes is focused on the heroes themselves; very little do people think about the loved ones, the people behind the scenes. Well, plenty of attention has been given to Tony Stark’s various liaisons (both real and speculated), and Pepper Potts is a well-known figure given that she’s CEO of Stark Industries; but even then, most of the gossip mags focus on what it’s like to be dating Tony Stark, billionaire playboy, not Iron Man.

The relationship between Steve Rogers and Peggy Carter is pretty well-documented, even though they never really got to be a _thing_. Now, Bucky Barnes is supposedly back from the dead, and Michelle thinks there might have been more than friendship behind the way Steve went after him and protected him, turned his back on the Avengers for him. (A small part of her is disappointed; she was rooting for him and Sam Wilson to get together).

She knows that Thor has a woman he’s pretty much besotted with, mostly because that woman is also a brilliant scientist, Dr. Jane Foster. There’s also Dr. Betty Ross, whose work Michelle also admires, and who may or may not have had a thing with Bruce Banner before (and during, and after) he became the Hulk. Dr. Ross seems mostly to avoid the public eye; Michelle can’t say she blames her.

Michelle finds video clips of press conferences where Pepper Potts looks tense and stressed as she wrangles reporters, fending off intrusive questions about Tony. She watches old clips of the Avengers out in public, focusing on Jane Foster’s expression; she watches her nimbly dodge the press, and smile reflexively whenever Thor’s name is mentioned, even as she repeats, “No comment.”

She reads the kind of material she usually avoids like the plague: lurid exposés and unverified rumour-mongering, just to get a sense of how superheroes’ love lives are dealt with in the press. (The stuff about Black Widow is as sexist and awful as she would have predicted, if not more so). 2am finds her reading forum threads which discuss the possibility of Clint Barton, aka Hawkeye, having a secret family hidden away somewhere in a rural backwater, maybe on a farm. Michelle can’t say she’s ever considered it before, but they make a compelling case.

She knows that being the… special someone for a superhero isn’t without its risks. In fact, it’s one of the fastest ways to become a target. You’re liable to be kidnapped, held hostage, or used as a bargaining chip for all sorts of unsavoury characters.

But regular people can get put in danger too; just look at what happened during the Chitauri invasion. Or Sokovia. Michelle knows self-defence and a mixed bag of jujitsu, judo and boxing moves, and she never goes anywhere without an attack alarm and pepper spray. She’ll never be completely safe, but Michelle figures that being close to a superhero is safer than being far away from one.

That’s when she realises the direction her thoughts have taken her. This thing with Peter isn’t just a movie date, a fun night out where they hold hands and share popcorn and she stomps on his foot for trying to pay for her ticket. No, Michelle thinks she might actually be _serious_ about Peter.

She groans and puts her face in her hands, slumping backwards in her desk chair. How did she let it come to this? In the space of a couple of weeks, she’s gone from being an independent, unattached and perfectly contented woman to a blushing, crushing mess who’s planning out her future with her high school sweetheart.

Fucking teenage hormones. Fucking Peter Parker.

 

* * *

 

The rest of the week leading up to Michelle’s movie date with Peter is pretty normal, except for the fact that the eye-contact-and-blushing thing is now turned up to 11. Being around Peter has Michelle feeling off-balance, which makes her snappish and irritable, while Peter is even more of a jittery, energetic mess than usual.

Ned, meanwhile, has found out about their date and takes every opportunity to loudly bemoan his inevitable fate as an eternal third wheel. Michelle always shuts him down with a flat retort that makes Peter laugh delightedly, which makes her heart stutter and the heat rise to her cheeks, bringing an answering blush to Peter’s face; he then does something overly enthusiastic and clumsy like slam his hand down too hard on the table or accidentally snort his juice up his nose; Ned makes a comment; and so on until the bell rings.

But finally it’s Friday evening and Michelle is standing outside the movie theatre at 5 past 7, absorbed in her book as she waits for Peter to arrive. Peter had almost forgotten to tell her the time of the movie, until Michelle had sarcastically asked him whether she should just stake out the theatre for an unspecified time period after school until he showed up. They’d agreed to meet at 7pm for a 7:30 showing.

Twenty-five minutes later, Michelle checks her phone and realises with a start that it’s half past already. She’d got lost in her book, but more to the point – where is Peter?

She sends him a quick, casual text: **_hey loser, if you were aiming for fashionably late you overshot. a girl can’t wait forever_**

Michelle tucks her phone away in her pocket, resisting the urge to follow up with, “ ** _you ok?_** _”_ As far as Peter knows, she has no reason to suspect that he isn’t just in the middle of a crisis over which necktie to wear, or that he hasn’t dozed off by accident after a long week at school.

But Michelle _knows_ , and she fears that the reality could be something much worse.

For ten more endless minutes, she waits, all of her senses on edge as she strains to pick up some clue about what might be going on, some sign that Peter is okay. Is that a siren she can hear, in the distance? Is that a shout she just heard, coming from an alley over there?

She scans the rooftops incessantly, looking for a flicker of movement, a hint of a red-and-blue figure swinging between the buildings. One hand clutches her phone in her pocket, and she waits for it to vibrate with an apologetic text from Peter, running late but on his way.

Then, finally, she spots him haring towards her at top speed from down the street.

“Peter!” she shouts. She can’t help it – it just bursts out of her, a mixture of anger and relief and pent-up tension. _He must think I’m so mad at him_. She is, kind of, but not for the reasons that he’ll think.

“MJ!” Peter all but skids to a halt in front of her, grabbing onto her shoulders. “MJ, I’m so, so sorry, I can explain-”

“Just hold on – take a moment to get your breath back,” Michelle chides. She’s trying to sound annoyed, but she thinks she just comes off sounding concerned. She scans him from head to toe, looking for any signs of injury. His hair is a mess, standing on end, but he looks to be physically unharmed. He’s wearing a nice outfit, a dark green button-down and navy blue slacks, although both are rumpled and only add to the impression that he’s been dragged through a hedge backwards. His backpack is hanging off one shoulder.

Peter breathes, and straightens up. “There was a car accident on fifth,” he says. He looks haunted. “Two cars collided with each other – looks like one of the drivers was drunk. The wreckage was bad. I barely-” He stops, and swallows whatever he was going to say before finishing lamely, “-managed to get past. The road was blocked. I’m so sorry.”

“Were the passengers okay?” Michelle asks, dreading the answer.

“Y-yeah. One of them was – uh, he looked pretty injured, and there were two kids in the back of the other car who were stuck, so, uh – Spider-Man had to come pull them out.”

“Good for Spider-Man,” Michelle says quietly.

Peter looks at her, and there’s a moment where she thinks he’s about to tell her the truth, to confess everything – then he gestures to the theatre behind them.

“D’you think we’re too late to catch the movie?”

Michelle checks her phone; the time is 7:51. “Allowing for trailers, we might still be in time to catch the beginning,” she says. “Are you sure you still want to? You seem pretty shaken up.”

Peter shakes his head. “No, I’m fine, I was just- I wanted this to be perfect,” he says quietly, and Michelle now knows exactly what it feels like when your heart skips a beat.

(It’s biologically impossible, but then so is he).

“I was afraid you’d think I stood you up,” Peter goes on. “I thought for sure you’d have given up and gone home.”

“Who do you think I am?” Michelle says. She holds up her book. “I was reading this. I barely even noticed you were late.”

She can still hear the echo of her own voice shouting his name, proving her a liar; but just as she pretends to have bought Peter’s half-lie about why he was late, he doesn’t challenge her on hers.

 

* * *

 

They miss the first ten minutes or so of the movie, but from what Michelle can tell, it’s the kind of film that builds up super slow to begin with, so they haven’t missed much development, and she manages to catch up with what’s going on pretty quickly.

The theatre is mostly empty, so they have their pick of the seats, and find a good spot in the middle, hastily settling their shared popcorn between them (which Michelle had allowed Peter to pay for only on the condition that he let her pay for the tickets. The memory of his conflicted, contorted expression is one she’ll cherish for quite some time).

Sitting in the darkened theatre next to Peter, Michelle experiences a brief stab of worry – she knows that most teenagers in a darkened, mostly deserted movie theatre would take the opportunity to make out, or at least get a little bit touchy-feely, but Michelle doesn’t feel comfortable about going there with Peter this soon. She glances sidelong at Peter, but he seems genuinely engrossed in the movie, content to do nothing more than let his knee press very lightly against hers and occasionally brush their hands together as they reach for popcorn at the same time. They’ve been more intimate with each other squashed together on Peter’s bed for movie night.

After about twenty minutes, Michelle relaxes; this is Peter, after all, and he’s never been anything but respectful of her boundaries. She trusts him, perhaps more deeply than she’s willing to admit. And not because he’s an actual, literal superhero; no, it’s his innate _goodness_ , his optimism and his relentless faith in people that makes her trust him – all things that, in her opinion, make someone a superhero far more than radioactive spider-powers.

 _God, I sound like such a sap,_ she thinks, and snorts a little with laughter. Peter glances over at her, but instead of asking why she’s laughing to herself in the middle of a fairly serious part of the movie, he just smiles at her, wide and happy.

 

* * *

 

After the movie ends, they wander out into the cool night air, verbally dissecting what they’d just watched and comparing thoughts on the cinematography, the acting, the allegory and allusions.

Peter seems calmer and more settled within himself than Michelle has ever seen him, a stark contrast to his harrowed, haunted demeanour before they went in. Michelle, for all that she pretends to be annoyed by it, likes Peter’s nervous energy and his scattershot, stream-of-conscious rambling; but she thinks she might like this side of him even more.

Later, looking back, Michelle realises she should have been paying more attention to their surroundings. Usually when making her way back home late at night she’s on high alert, her hand never far from triggering her attack alarm. Parts of New York aren’t safe for anyone to walk through after dark, but least of all for a woman of colour. She’s been harassed, threatened and followed before – sometimes all three at the same time.

She thinks Peter must have led them down a different route to the one she’d usually take coming back from theatre, probably to avoid the site of the accident that he attended as Spider-Man earlier that evening. He probably wasn’t even thinking about the possible dangers – after all, Spider-Man doesn’t have that much to fear from a darkened alleyway.

Either way, all she knows is that one minute they’re walking along, chatting about summer blockbusters; in the next, Peter is shouting and pushing her behind him.

Startled, Michelle drops her bag; her cry of indignation mingles with the incoherent yelling of the man who lurches from the shadows, kitchen knife outstretched. He’s not the most intimidating mugger she’s ever been confronted by, but that blade could do some serious damage in the wrong hands, and these are definitely the wrong hands.

“Hold up, man, hold up, we don’t want any trouble!” Peter is saying, his tone soothing, trying to pacify their attacker. The man’s yelling, if anything, doubles in volume. Michelle thinks she makes out some racist slurs in there; lovely.

“Peter,” she hisses in his ear. “Distract him while I go for my bag.” It’s got her pepper spray in there, and if she can get him in the eyes, then she figures Peter will be able to tackle him or web him up or whatever it is he does.

Peter hesitates, tension in every inch of his frame. “MJ,” he whispers finally. “There’s something… you need to know.”

Oh Christ, were they having the big identity reveal _now?_ Michelle tries to keep her voice level and calm; they don’t have time for this.

“I already know,” she says.

“I know this might come as a- wait, what?”

“I already know,” Michelle repeats. “About your secret identity.” She lowers her voice even more, trusting his enhanced senses to pick it up. “I know you’re Spider-Man, but unless you want this shithead to know your real identity, you can’t change into the suit in full view, so I need the chance to get my pepper spray so that I can blind him and let you do your Spidey thing. Ready? GO!”

Michelle will give Peter one thing; he’s fast. As she dives for the bag, Peter is already bringing up one foot in an overly showy roundhouse kick that barely connects with the mugger’s head. Next thing, he appears to be knocked down to the ground, out cold. Michelle isn’t watching, because her fingers have closed around the pepper spray and she can hear heavy footsteps coming closer.

One second, two seconds, then she whips around and unloads 2,000,000 Scoville units of pepper spray directly into his face.

Their attacker screams and claws at his red, streaming eyes. He’s in no condition to notice that Peter has magically disappeared from the ground. In the next second, a web comes shooting down from the sky and attaches to the man’s knife; one flick, and the knife goes clattering away across the ground.

Michelle looks around, and suddenly comes face to face with Spider-Man – no, Peter – hanging up-side down. “Hi there,” he says, and his voice is so familiar that she can’t think why she was fooled for so long.

Michelle pushes her hair out of her face. “Finally,” she says, and while it sounds like she’s referring to the timing of ‘Spider-Man’s’ arrival, she knows that he understands her meaning.

“Sorry about that – I was a little _tied up_ ,” says Spidey, shooting webs at the man’s hands and feet, instantly sticking them together. Michelle groans. She might have known that Peter would use being Spider-Man as an excuse to make awful puns.

Peter ignores her, busy tripping the man up and quipping about how he should _stick around_ for the cops to arrive ( _really, Peter?)._ Then he pulls out a square of paper from somewhere and webs it to the guy’s forehead, before scrawling a message across it in block capitals. When he steps back, the piece of paper reads:

**BAD CRIMINAL (HE HAD A KNIFE)**

**PLEASE ARREST HIM**

**THANKS – SPIDER-MAN**

Finally, as an afterthought, he webs the man’s mouth shut, and blissful silence reigns.

Michelle looks at Peter, looks at the red and blue Spider-Man mask with the blank eyepieces, and remembers the last time she met Spider-Man, being unsure whether he was looking at her. She doesn’t have any reason to doubt it any more.

“The cops will be here soon,” Peter begins, breaking into the pregnant silence. “I’ve attached a gadget to him-” he waves a hand at the immobilised mugger, who is hunched over and groaning on the ground, and Michelle makes out a device shaped like a little black spider clinging to his chest, emitting a blinking red light, “that will ping the nearest police scanner and let them know where to find him. They can do the rest.”

“Handy,” says Michelle.

“I have the best tech,” Peter agrees, with a distinct note of pride in his voice.

“I’m pretty sure _Iron Man_ has the best tech.” Michelle can’t resist needling him a little bit, and though she can’t see Peter’s expression, she can hear the indignant pout as he replies,

“Iron Man _built_ my tech!”

In that moment, it’s as if the absurdity of the situation hits both of them. _We’re having an argument about superhero tech, in the middle of an alley with an incapacitated mugger behind us, like it’s totally normal._

She doesn’t know whether to laugh hysterically or… well, or laugh hysterically.

Peter steps closer to her. “So… You want to get out of here?”

Michelle narrows her eyes. “Is this the part where you take me for a romantic night swing above the city?”

Peter falters slightly. He probably thought he was being smooth and romantic, the dork. “Well, uh- O-only if you want to! I figured it would be quicker. And we could talk someplace more private.”

In answer, Michelle loops her arms lightly around his neck. She feels Peter shiver slightly, but his shoulders are reassuringly solid beneath her. His arms come up to grip firmly around her waist.

“Just don’t drop me,” Michelle warns.

There’s a jolt in her stomach as they take off, which feels a lot like the time she went on one of those bungee trampoline things as a kid, except instead of reaching the top of her jump and then plummeting straight back down, there’s a moment of breathless suspension at the top of each swing, and then Peter fires his next web and they’re flying forwards again.

Or at least, that’s the idea. The first time Peter goes to fire his next web, he tries to use the hand that’s holding Michelle to him, and then quickly realises that would be a Bad Idea.

“Shit- sorry, sorry!” They’re briefly in freefall as Michelle wonders if they’re going to die, then Peter fires out another web which attaches to a building, and they hurtle forwards, narrowly missing the side of an apartment block.

“Are you sure you know what you’re doing?” Michelle shouts, trying to sound stern and sarcastic rather than terrified.

“I do! I just haven’t done this with a passenger before!” Peter yells back. Oh, great. On the one hand, a small, possessive part of Michelle is happy that she’s the only person he’s carried around like this. The rest of her wishes that he’d found a way to practice before risking her life and sanity on a late-night flight through the city.

Gradually, though, things smooth out, and Michelle is able to relax (fractionally) and enjoy the ride a little. She tucks herself into Peter to try and reduce the drag resistance (no, really, that’s the only reason) and stares out at the city lights as they whip past her, taking her breath away with them.

It’s still slightly terrifying, but also freeing. Michelle wonders how Peter can stand to walk anywhere when he could be moving around like _this_.

“We’re almost there,” Peter says, far too soon, and Michelle exhales in part-disappointment, part-relief. With a final swing upwards, they land lightly on top of a building. It’s a sort of rooftop seating area, but it doesn’t look as though anyone has used it in ages.

Peter sweeps some dirt off one of the benches with a gloved hand, and they sit down. Michelle looks at him, and Peter pulls his mask off. Even though she knew exactly whose face was beneath the mask this whole time, it’s still a weird sight. She takes in the juxtaposition of Peter’s familiar, goofy face against the red skintight suit etched with black webbing, the black spider insignia on his chest.

“So,” says Michelle.

“So,” Peter replies, slightly breathlessly. “You… knew I was Spider-Man? This whole time?”

Michelle shakes her head. “I only worked it out recently,” she says. “I’m surprised you didn’t realise, actually, with the questions at Decathlon… I thought I’d made it obvious.”

“I mean, there were a bunch of times where I was sure you knew,” Peter confesses. “With how smart you are, I knew it was only a matter of time before you figured it out. But I had to keep acting as if you didn’t, just in case.”

Michelle refuses to blush at the compliment – much. “It was only a matter of time because you’re terrible at keeping secrets,” she says. “And Ned, by the way, is even worse.”

Peter pulls a face. “I didn’t mean for Ned to find out,” he says. “He came over one night without warning, went up to my room, I came through the window wearing the Spidey suit… and yeah. Busted.”

Michelle can’t help laughing at the mental image. “Oh, my god. You came through the _window?”_

Peter nods. “I was crawling on the ceiling. Kinda hard to deny being Spider-Man after that.”

Michelle laughs even harder. “What I would pay to have seen Ned’s face in that moment,” she wheezes.

As the laughter subsides, she realises Peter is just… looking at her. She feels self-conscious suddenly, knowing that she doesn’t normally openly display this much emotion.

She clears her throat. “See what I mean? Terrible,” she says.

A brief silence falls between them. Then Peter says,

“So… Do you have any questions? About the whole… me being Spider-Man thing?”

“Questions?”

“Yeah. Like, how did I get my powers, how does the whole spider-thing work… Ned had loads, when he found out,” says Peter.

Michelle considers this for a moment. In truth, she already knows a lot about him, or rather about Spider-Man, thanks to her interest in superheroes, but it wouldn’t do to let him know that. She doesn’t want him getting a big head.

She could ask how he got his powers and settle the whole ‘radioactive spider’ question once and for all, but in a way, she doesn’t really care where he got them from. It doesn’t make a difference to the way things are right now – although knowing Peter, the story is probably hilariously ridiculous and she’ll definitely ask him about it someday.

“Are you going to become an Avenger?” she asks eventually. “I mean, you’ve already fought with them, but I figure you’re not a fully-fledged Avenger yet, since you didn’t move upstate with them to the new facility.”  
  
Peter nods slowly. “Mr. Stark invited me to join the Avengers,” he says. “I mean, I think it was sort of a test to see if I was ready, but he had a new suit for me and everything… I said no, though. I’m not even sixteen yet; I wanna still be a kid and have a normal life while I can. But later on, well… I want to go to college first. Then I’ll figure out what to do.”  
  
Michelle nods too, absorbing this. “I think you made the right call,” she says.  
  
“Yeah?”

“Yeah. Shockingly,” she adds, teasing him almost reflexively. There’s no real heat to it, and she thinks Peter can tell, but it feels like she has to try and keep things light-hearted, or they’ll stray into territory that she has no idea how to navigate.  
  
Peter smiles at her, but then he says, “Why do you ask?” and oh no, she’s gone and landed them in it anyway.  
  
“No reason,” Michelle hedges. “Just wondered, I guess.”

Then she stops, and gives herself a mental shake. She has never been anything but direct and honest before, but here she is, playing coy and beating about the bush – all traits that she detests in other people.

 _Get a grip, MJ_ , she tells herself. _You gave the winning answer at the academic Decathlon national finals. You’re an activist for social justice who regularly grapples with complex discourses on racism, feminism and intersectionality, but you can’t even be honest with the guy you like._

She did _research_ , for crying out loud. She’s pretty much all in at this point.   
  
“Actually, that’s not true,” she says, over whatever Peter is beginning to say. “I asked because…” Michelle stops, and looks him in the eye. “I wanted to know where we stood.”

“Where we stood?” Peter asks, confused.  
  
“Yeah. Are you going to go rushing off to become an Avenger in two months, or is this thing with us going to have a future? Because I’m not moving upstate.”  
  
Peter is beginning to smile, delightedly, like she’s surprised him beyond anything he could have expected. “What thing with us?” he asks.  
  
Either he’s being really dense, or he’s messing with her, Michelle thinks in frustration. She leans in towards him slightly. “This thing where I really like you,” she murmurs, and then kisses him.

It’s Michelle’s first kiss, and she thinks it might be Peter’s too. Their lips touch together lightly, tentatively, and it’s sort of awkward – Peter’s hand comes up and hovers uncertainly, then comes to rest on her elbow, of all places; meanwhile, Michelle puts her hand on his waist, and is almost startled to feel the Spider-Man suit underneath her palm. She’d sort of forgotten he was wearing it. Then she gets distracted thinking about how tightly it fits to his body and the fact that he clearly doesn’t wear any other layers underneath and oh no, bad mind, don’t start going there-

By the time they break apart, Michelle’s face is practically on fire. Peter looks a little dazed, like someone who recently got hit over the head with something heavy.

 “That was, um…”

Michelle frowns in sudden realisation. “Peter, where are your clothes?”

Peter looks briefly panicked, and looks down as if he suddenly expects to find himself naked. “I’m wearing clothes,” he says, almost as if to reassure himself. “I’m wearing my Spidey suit.”

“No, dumbass, the clothes you were wearing _before_. And didn’t you have a backpack? What did you do with them?”

“Uh…” Peter falters and Michelle closes her eyes.

“Please don’t say you left them in the alley.”

“I, uh… I webbed them up pretty high? They’re probably still there.”

Michelle jumps to her feet. “How long does your webbing usually hold for?”

“A couple of hours? It’s only been about forty minutes so far.”

Michelle walks towards the edge of the rooftop. “All right then, here’s what we’re going to do,” she instructs. “You’re going to put your mask back on, swing us back down to the alley to get your clothes, then you’re going to change back into that outfit – which was nice, by the way – and walk me home. And maybe, afterwards, I’ll kiss you goodnight.”

Peter smiles, walking up next to her with his mask in one hand. “I think I can do that. Do I uh, get to kiss you again now?”

“Nope. You’ve got to earn it.”

“All right.”

He rolls the mask back down over his face, and Michelle positions herself ready for them to swing off again, with one arm curled around his shoulders and the other around his waist. She’s already getting the hang of this.

As Peter fires his web and launches them both into the air, she thinks, _We’re going to have the dumbest love story ever._

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> ASFDGHADJKJNLKM AND IT'S DONE. God, I love these two nerds so much. <333
> 
> I can't say for sure whether I'll post anything more with Peter/MJ any time soon, but I have a few ideas in my head and a week's holiday coming up, so watch this space ^^

**Author's Note:**

> Pssst... I also [made a page for Spideychelle](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Michelle_Jones/Peter_Parker) on Fanlore. Come and help me edit it!


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